This is Jonathan's Schwartz posting on the Sun BlackBox. For those out of the know, the BlackBox is a portable data center, a shipping container packed with servers and associated gear. You can deploy it in weeks. He makes some pretty good points, namely, what is your company going to do when you can't afford the power to run your machines?
It's already happening in England, where the rise in power costs will make the UK the most expensive place in Europe to run a data center.
If you havent staked out your power supply for the next 30 years, you are probably already in tepid water. It explains the mad scramble in the US Northwest to get the cheap hydro up there, and also explains why Google is going solar in a big way. I would not be surprised if you see Microsoft or Google buying a utility or two in the next few years. That's when things will get really interesting; power computers, or lights for residential comsumers?
There is something about the BlackBox that is ominious. Essentially, what Sun is saying is that (gulp) you may need to move your computing power around physically in the next few years. This is such a new concept it boggles the mind. We alway assumed that we could just move our computing resources around virtually, and indeed we can, now. But when the network is down, say, one day a week, because there's no juice to run it, there is going to be disruption.
I'm telling you, Sun just blows me away with this stuff.
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